How to lose a war & you honor to the media

[shintao]

A Vet Brother sent this to me. Truer words never spoken, and from our enemy.

General VoNguyen Giap.
General Giap was a brilliant, highly respected leader
of the North Vietnam military. The following quote
is from his memoirs currently found in the
Vietnam war memorial in Hanoi :


'What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi . You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battle of TET. You defeated us!
We knew it, and we thought you knew it.

But we were elated to notice your media was helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!'

General Giap has published his memoirs and confirmed what most Americans knew. The Vietnam war was not lost in Vietnam -- it was lost at home. The same slippery slope, sponsored by the US media, is currently underway. It exposes the enormous power of a Biased Media to cut out the heart and will of the American public.

A truism worthy of note: ... Do not fear the enemy, for they can take only your life.
Fear the media, for they will destroy your honor.

 

[editec]

Not that I doubt that this General wrote this, but have my doubts that North Viet Nam was prepared to surrender.

 

[Douger]

What seems to confuse most people is that he wan't YOUR enemy. You have no enemies ) other than maybe mom-in-law). It's your governments that are enemies. We are nothing but stupid pawns in their games.

 

[whitehall]

Right after the American victory of TET Walter Cronkite rushed over to VietNam, put on a helmet and flack jacket for the cameras and pronounced the victory to be a "stalemate". The news came as a shock to LBJ and in a press conference he tearfully told the world that he had enough and would not be running for re-election. The enemy took his words to mean he surrendered. LBJ handed the war to Richard Nixon and the media made sure that victory would never come during a republican administration.

 

[rightwinger]

That was easy..

General Giap on How U.S. Lost the Vietnam War - Urban Legends

Analysis: Circulating in various forms ever since the 1990s, this statement attributed to General Vo Nguyen Giap of North Vietnam is not authentic, has never been authentic, nor will any amount of repetition will make it so.


According to Clemson University history professor Edwin Moise, General Giap never wrote or stated any such thing. From Moise's comprehensive Vietnam War Bibliography (emphasis added):
Supposedly, General Giap had written in How We Won the War that in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive of 1968, the Communist leaders in Vietnam had been ready to abandon the war, but that a broadcast by Walter Cronkite, declaring the Tet Offensive a Communist victory, persuaded them to change their minds and fight on. This rumor was entirely false. Giap had not mentioned Cronkite, and had not said the Communists had ever considered giving up on the war.

Several variants of this rumor appeared in 2004. In these, Giap is supposed to have credited either the American anti-war movement in general, or John Kerry's organization (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) in particular, for persuading the Communist leaders to change their minds and not give up on the war. Giap is sometimes said to have made this statement in How We Won the War, sometimes in an unnamed 1985 memoir. All versions of the rumor are false. Neither in How We Won the War, nor in any other book (the 1985 memoir is entirely imaginary), has Giap mentioned Kerry or Vietnam Veterans Against the War, or said that the Communist leaders had ever considered giving up on the war.

 

[SFC Ollie]

Yet reading from what so many said years later we know this statement may not have been correct or attributed correctly, but that it was and is basically the truth.

Read at the end what Col Bui Tin had to say to the Wall Street Journal.

snopes.com: General Vo Nguyen Giap on Vietnam

 

[rightwinger]

Yet reading from what so many said years later we know this statement may not have been correct or attributed correctly, but that it was and is basically the truth.

Read at the end what Col Bui Tin had to say to the Wall Street Journal.

snopes.com: General Vo Nguyen Giap on Vietnam

Americans do not like long drawn out conflicts on foreign soil that do not directly benefit the US. We gave 50,000 of our boys to this conflict. In the end, our worst case scenario played out.....the Communists won
Did our world come to an end? Did a domino theory take hold and the whole hemisphere come under communist control?
We moved on, VietNam lived on and now sells clothing to WalMart. Did we really need to give 50,000 of our boys for that?

 

[Trajan]

Yet reading from what so many said years later we know this statement may not have been correct or attributed correctly, but that it was and is basically the truth.

Read at the end what Col Bui Tin had to say to the Wall Street Journal.

snopes.com: General Vo Nguyen Giap on Vietnam

nice find Ollie thank you, I have read this as well. further there have been in the last several years several 'memoirs' translated, that were authored by member's of the general staffs and political appointees during the war.

Mark Moyer chronicles many of the oral histories and translations in a book called 'Triumph Forsaken'..one that stays with me;

- the assassination of Diem was an error of unimaginable magnitude. Ho Chi Minh said, chronicled by an Australian journalist sympathetic to the communist efforts Wilfred Burchett;

"I can scarcely believe that the Americans would be so stupid".

theres a ton of eye eyeopening revelations that have sadly been consigned to the same archives and the who cares anymore file, ala where is hoffa buried and what happened to judge Crater.

 

[Toome]

Regardless of whether General Giap said this or whether the North Vietnamese were ever seriously considering surrender, the point is that Vietnam was a very different war. World Wars I and II were defined in very traditional, capture the enemy flag, terms. The Korean War was limited only out of fear of it escalating into a nuclear showdown between the superpowers.

Vietnam is what defined warfare in the 21st century. Military leaders have always been quick to dismiss it as an anomaly (hence the terms, "operations other than war" and "low-intensity conflict"). What Vietnam taught us is that warfare is more complex than simply taking over terrain by force or killing 'em all and letting God sort 'em out. It introduced a new dimension: public perception. We weren't the first ones to learn this lesson. The French learned it the hard way at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. From a strictly military perspective, it was not a significant military battle; certainly not on the World War II scale. However, it significantly altered French public opinion and led to the withdrawal of French forces from Vietnam. Then we came in and repeated the same mistakes.

It's too easy to put the blame on the news media. And I'm no fan of the media. However, I can't buy into the notion that the media is solely or partly responsible for how the Vietnam War ended. There are too many other complex factors that play a role, and the government certainly is a key player. No one really doubted the need to get involved in World War II, even though we were very isolationist until Pearl Harbor. After that, it's been pretty hard to rally the American people around a common cause or an easily agreed cause.

I don't think news censorship is ever a good idea. Yeah, I don't like Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I think US national interests were seriously damaged. However, if I leave my front door unlocked, I can't blame anyone else but me for my carelessness even though the burglar who robbed me committed a crime. And if we are going to put men and women into harm's way, then the reason for doing so better be worth the risk, and in too many instances, worth the sacrifice in terms of amputated limbs or body bags. Point here is that if we allow ourselves to scapegoat the media, then we start taking dangerous steps towards restricting free speech and freedom of the press. That's not who we are; that's not the principles our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend.

 

[SFC Ollie]

It would be nice if we had never gone into Vietnam. But for whatever reasons we did. And we never lost a major battle. Yet we lost the war. Why? Maybe because of the media at least partially, maybe because of the government, a combination of the 2? We did not lose in Vietnam.

 

[Toome]

It would be nice if we had never gone into Vietnam. But for whatever reasons we did. And we never lost a major battle. Yet we lost the war. Why? Maybe because of the media at least partially, maybe because of the government, a combination of the 2? We did not lose in Vietnam.

Agreed.

We wiped out the Viet Cong. Actually, we slaughtered them. And we inflicted enough damage to the North Vietnamese Army that it was not an effective fighting force in terms of being able to launch a major campaign. It was reduced to hit-and-run tactics and taking advantage of our political limitations by running back into Laos and/or Cambodia. It took two years for the NVA to reconstitute, and even then they were afraid of American intervention even though we had already pulled out all of our combat troops, before they launched their final push into the South in 1975.

However, looking at it from a Clauswitzian perspective ("war is the continuation of politics by other means"), then Vietnam was a defeat because we failed to attain our political objectives even though we basically owned the battlefield.

The news media portrays Vietnam as a meat grinder with heavy American losses. In reality, up until that time, Vietnam had the lowest casualty rate in US history. The survivability rate for a combat troop was the highest ever. Not true for the NVA and the VC. The average North Vietnamese regular troop or guerrilla fighter was basically destined to be killed or wounded when going against American forces. I'm not saying that it was a picnic. Combat, regardless of scale, is never a picnic. But media bias certainly distorted what was actually going on just like it does today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even so, I still pin the rose of responsibility on the government (Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Ford) for the outcome rather than the news media.

 

[The Gadfly]

It would be nice if we had never gone into Vietnam. But for whatever reasons we did. And we never lost a major battle. Yet we lost the war. Why? Maybe because of the media at least partially, maybe because of the government, a combination of the 2? We did not lose in Vietnam.

Agreed.

We wiped out the Viet Cong. Actually, we slaughtered them. And we inflicted enough damage to the North Vietnamese Army that it was not an effective fighting force in terms of being able to launch a major campaign. It was reduced to hit-and-run tactics and taking advantage of our political limitations by running back into Laos and/or Cambodia. It took two years for the NVA to reconstitute, and even then they were afraid of American intervention even though we had already pulled out all of our combat troops, before they launched their final push into the South in 1975.

However, looking at it from a Clauswitzian perspective ("war is the continuation of politics by other means"), then Vietnam was a defeat because we failed to attain our political objectives even though we basically owned the battlefield.

The news media portrays Vietnam as a meat grinder with heavy American losses. In reality, up until that time, Vietnam had the lowest casualty rate in US history. The survivability rate for a combat troop was the highest ever. Not true for the NVA and the VC. The average North Vietnamese regular troop or guerrilla fighter was basically destined to be killed or wounded when going against American forces. I'm not saying that it was a picnic. Combat, regardless of scale, is never a picnic. But media bias certainly distorted what was actually going on just like it does today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even so, I still pin the rose of responsibility on the government (Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Ford) for the outcome rather than the news media.

We kicked Charlie's sorry arse from one end of Vietnam to the other. We took on the best of the NVA, and we cut them to ribbons. I saw it; I was there. We won that war on the battlefield, and the damn reporters, who only cared about making a Pulitzer for themselves, or a big reputation, out of OUR blood, and OUR guts, made sure we lost it back home, and that the the rest of America blamed US for it. They didn't give a damn for the truth, just what would sell. They didn't give a damn about their own country, and they sure as hell didn't give a damn about those of us who were fighting for it! They exploited the living, and dishonored the dead. It's been damn near 40 years, and I have yet to hear even one of those selfish, overpaid, egotistical "Journalists" offer up one word of apology for their deliberate and systematic distortions and lies. I believed then, and I believe today, that the unadulterated Bravo Sierra they spewed from their papers and the airwaves was mostly responsible for that wonderful "welcome" we all got when we came home. I have cordially despised every single under-educated, gutless, selfish, self-important, lying puke of a "reporter" ever since. I'd like to have had the privilege of making every single one of them I met in Vietnam walk point in the jungle with a damn cowbell around their scrawny chicken necks!

Integrity? What "integrity"? I've never met a reporter who had any idea of the meaning of the word. If I ever had to fight another war, the last thing I would want anywhere within a thousand miles, is a single one of their sorry species. May God forgive their miserable, rotten souls (if they have one), because I never will!